Solar Eclipse: A wonder of our solar system

On Wednesday 14th of November, the very tip of Australia was lucky enough to experience a once in a lifetime event which will not happen again in another 300 years. I’m lucky that the solar eclipse happened in my own backyard. The eclipse was surreal, I thought I was dream the whole event. People who have witnessed a solar eclipse would know what the experience is like.

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The eclipse totality happen around 6:40 AEST and lasted for 2 minutes. Thirty minutes before that, I woke up to find the sun shining with an orange sunset colour. Without solar eclipse glasses there was no way of telling whether the moon had already started moving directly across the line of sight between the earth and the sun.

Ten minutes out from totality and you could feel that the sun was losing its heat and the summer morning (very warm Australian summer morning) started to become cooler. If you had a look at your shadow, there was no definite outline of your shadow, it had become blurry. Hot air balloons that took tourists for flights in the hinterland of Cairns had front row seats to the event.

Then forty seconds to totality, the most beautiful thing happened. As the moon moved across the sun, a diamond effect was created by the suns rays shining through the moons craters and valleys. I got a glimpse of my shadow which became multi-layered and it flickered like a science fiction computer that had just lost connection. Totality was out of this world, the birds that were chirping 10 seconds before totality were dead silent. I was up on the roof and the view was spectacular.

To my right floating peacefully in the eclipse sky where the hot air balloons, occasionally burning helium to sustain their altitude. To my left flying directly above me in the now dim sky, was Venus. Because of where I live I could still see the suns rays in the far distance. The eclipse is some thing that you have to experience to actually know what it feels like. The stillness during totality, the cooling down of the earths surface, the diamond ring effect and the corona flaming around the moon. It’s a once in a lifetime experience for me and I’m sure I will never forget it. I’m sorry I didn’t take a picture of the diamond ring effect.

On a side note, God created a wonderful phenomena and we should be thankful.